Vision And Purpose For The View

The Ethiopic Viewer (Eview) started off as a hack and evolved as new ideas
came along. Later features were added with little more care taken than when
Eview was originally Frankensteined out of EthioTalk (may it rest in peace).
It has been a lot of fun to code on the fly and get a new version uploaded
before an impending exam hits. But now a new purpose is found for The Viewer
that requires the patch work of 2nd rate coding that is Eview be brought into
a formal and accessible form.

Eview has served as a practical testbed for SERA encoding, a means to generate
Fidel gifs for web pages, also as an abassador of sorts to aid discussion of
Fidel script in a practical with computer and software organizations. Experience
has shown that for the purpose of this last utility, an elegant, robust, and
easily portable script viewer is essential for new implementations of, and
development for Fidel. The same truth holds for the availability of a variety of
fonts, a fixed address scheme, and generic parser codes, for softwareand system
developers to work with.

The emphirical rule of thumb applied here is that Fidel will be imported
into greater numbers of computer applications as the work required to do so is
minimized. Continuing to develop Eview in a directed manner builds the tools
(fonts, code libraries, and encoding) that other organizations will need to work
with. That these tools be free, trasportable, simple, and readily extendible is
essential to this purpose.

A personal benefit that developing Eview has had for me is that it provides
oppurtunities to improve my own programming skills. For this gain alone I will
continue to develop it even after such a time as it has out lived its usefullness
and been eclipsed by newer methods and software. Starting with release 0.5 the
code should be in a more modularized form and be open to simple extensions by
other parties.

Periods of maturation and new realizations come along in the course of one's
life that may later identify the change of stream life took then, and so marked
the beginning and end of a chapter in our lives' story. Within these periods of
new experience and changing identity that we pass through we retain the temporal
reference to our origin, our age. Discretely known is age but less it tells of
character, conflict, and triumph than would the title of the chapter or the
content of a page.

The work that becomes Eview at any point in time is given an artificial age
in the form of an equally nondescriptive version number. So then, let it be
that the episodes in the life of Eview be written to give the life of the
work dimension of character.

Cognition and Genesis

**Eview 0.0 : Root Of All View

Eview 0.0 is hacked out of EthioTalk v0.2 by Fisseha
at the request of Yacob.

First Breath and Daylight

**Eview 0.1 -> Eview 0.3 : Gestating View

Eview is released to the public and grows with SERA
updates, and with improved understanding of font and
X11 issues. The original gez.asc font is universalized
as BDF.

Childhood's End & Metamorphosis

**Eview 0.4 -> Eview 0.5 : Higher View

The basic features for graphical font manipulations
are down. The SERA parser goes lex/yacc and X hacks
become a widget.

The viewer begins to serve other SERA tools that have
arisen and finds new purpose as a GUI for SERA Unix
software. The name ``Eview'' is abandoned as the
journey to new destiny begins.

The Time of Transferance

**Eview 0.6 -> Eview 0.8 : Edit What You View

Existing features see maturation, the widget core becomes
robust. VI like editing is added incrementally.
New compatibilities are added as new software arrives.
Localizations for Fidel should become feasible.
Ethio IRC interface and more web features become possibilities.

The Hour of The Gate

**Eview 0.9 : Penultimate View

The final Eview before the Age of Second Genesis. Features
of v0.9 may include Guile codes, localization for IM, Plan 9
compatibility,

Ras Tar Ayiam & Second Genesis

**Eview 1.0 : Negus View

The Age of Second Genesis is defined by the introduction of
morphological spell checking. The expected sequence for whcih
spell checking will be available for is; verbs, nouns, adverbs,
other. For languages; Amharic, Tigrigna, and (ultimately) Tigre
and Ge'ez.